“The consequences of this financing result in negative attitudes for peaceful coexistence, such as the creation of ghettos and parallel societies, Islamic courts and police systems outside the law, girls being taken out of school, forced marriages and so on,” reads the CNI report, which has been accessed by EL PAÍS. “There is not enough control over the financial flows represented by donations and aid from other countries to Spain’s Islamic community,” the report continues. “It becomes necessary for the donor countries to be fully aware of the risks entailed by financing individual requests.”

The Spanish government wants oil monarchies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia to only fund projects that have been first submitted to the Islamic Commission of Spain (CIE), the official mediator, for approval. In the mid-term, however, Spain wants to end foreign intromission.

“The right to and the management of Spaniards’ religious freedom, no matter what their faith, cannot be dependent on any foreign country,” read a joint report by the justice and interior ministries in 2009.

From the Gult, a flood of pamphlets arrive that irritate the Spanish authorities. “Today’s Europe is still considering that the white race is superior,” notes a paper published in Castilian by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Qatar under the title “Muhammad. The Ideal Prophet”. “Europe, with all its pretensions to enlighten and lead (…) is still behind Islam,” it continues (…). Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has also shown, when he still had the means, predilection for the Spanish converts grouped in the Islamic Council of Spain (ICS). He established a “personal relationship”, according to the CNI, with ICS’ president, a psychiatrist based in Cordoba Francisco Jose Escudero, who adopted the Arabic name of Mansour, who died last October, .

The Secret Service also notes in its report some specific financial operations, such as the 300,000€ paid by Qatar to remodel the Catalan Islamic Cultural Center, but it does not provide overall figures. “For the most part, they are using alternative channels to bring these donations beyond the control of the regular Spanish financial system,” he says.

Needless to say, the more generous of all is Saudi Arabia, by direct donations to the royal family, others made by its Embassy in Madrid and a host of charities more or less official. The string of mosques and centers which receive its aid recipients “are not characterized by its high level of radicalism,” according to the CNI, although their “submission” to the Saudis is complete.

As noted in a 2008 report by a Christian human-rights organization, “Apostates from Islam to another religion suffer a host of serious abuses from their families, communities and nations.” These renegade Muslims may well face the death penalty in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan, and other forms of oppression in many other Muslim societies.

The reason for this systemic violation of religious freedom is, unfortunately, religious. Most classical schools of sharia law consider apostasy from Islam a crime punishable by death. A hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad is quite clear on this: “If somebody [among Muslims] discards his religion, kill him.” The implication is that Islam is a religion with free entry but no free exit. Continue reading →

Muslim “child-marriage”—euphemism for pedophilia—is making headlines again, at least in Arabic media: Dr. Salih bin Fawzan, a prominent cleric and member of Saudi Arabia’s highest religious council, just issued a fatwa asserting that there is no minimum age for marriage, and that girls can be married “even if they are in the cradle.”…

The point of the Saudi fatwa, however, is not that girls as young as 9 can have sex, based on Muhammad’s example, but rather that there is no age limit whatsoever; the only question open to consideration is whether the girl is physically capable of handling her husband/rapist. Fawzan documents this point by quoting Ibn Batal’s authoritative exegesis of Sahih Bukhari:

The ulema [Islam’s interpreters] have agreed that it is permissible for fathers to marry off their small daughters, even if they are in the cradle. But it is not permissible for their husbands to have sex with them unless they are capable of being placed beneath and bearing the weight of the men. And their capability in this regard varies based on their nature and capacity. Aisha was 6 when she married the prophet, but he had sex with her when she was 9 [i.e., when she was deemed capable].

Fawzan concludes his fatwa with a warning: “It behooves those who call for setting a minimum age for marriage to fear Allah and not contradict his Sharia, or try to legislate things Allah did not permit. For laws are Allah’s province; and legislation is his excusive right, to be shared by none other. And among these are the rules governing marriage.”

Days ago, Amnesty International published a leaked draft of the new Saudi Anti-Terror law, which the organization described, in a statement, as a “law that would allow the authorities to prosecute peaceful dissents with harsh penalties as terrorist crime” adding that this law would punish questioning the integrity of the King or the Crown Prince with a minimum prison sentence of 10 years. Amnesty International (@amnesty) brought the news through Twitter, where many people have reacted with the hash tag #SaudiTerrorLaw:

Just three weeks ago, Darsem binti Dawud Tawar was facing execution by beheading in Saudi Arabia for murder, which she claims was an act of self-defense. Now, finally back home in Indonesia, she is a free woman — after the Indonesian government paid more than $500,000 in “blood money.”

Holding her young son tightly, as she faced the glare of the media, Darsem was reunited with her family on Wednesday at the Indonesian Foreign Ministry in Jakarta. She first left her West Java hometown for a job as a maid in the Middle East in 2006, when her son was just a baby. Continue reading →

An arrogant Saudi woman made the mistake of her life when she retaliated to a heavy joke by her husband with a much heavier one. The husband simply turned his joke into reality and married another woman.

The unnamed couple were visiting the wife’s family when her husband joked by telling her brothers that he would marry again.

“His wife joked back but it was a much heavier joke when she told him ‘I can kick you with my leg any time and marry another one with my money.”

“Her husband got furious and decided to marry another woman…her brothers tried to calm him down but he felt very offended,” Kabar newspaper said in a report from the capital Riyadh on Monday.

“The real joke is that he went ahead with the marriage and the brothers of his first wife paid all wedding costs….that wife paid a heavy price of her joke.”

“Rights groups in Sri Lanka have joined hands with Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) to call on the government of Sri Lanka to conduct a full probe,” said Catholic priest Priest Father Nandana Manatunga, head of the House of Torture Victims in the diocese of Kandy.

Hong Kong-based AHRC said last week the housemaid signed a statement two years after the incident, saying she was forced to admit to the killing after being beaten up by local police, and that she signed a confession under duress.

Meanwhile, Indonesia has stopped sending maids to Saudi Arabia in protest for this execution.